Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Would you play the "disability" card on this?

Sounds good! I remember hearing that same toughen them up for Middle School concept last year for my son (who seems very like your child :))
This year DS (11) is in 6th grade and in his first year of Middle School. We dropped his special ed IEP last Spring but picked up the critical support needs under his Gifted IEP and it is working well. The Gifted Teacher has been a better advocate for our son's needs than the Special Ed department anyway! They were good, but given DS's gifted nature, their suggestions and action plans sometimes felt a bit off target. Plus, since he did not have poor grades,
As a note, DS is doing very well overall with the locker and class change schedule. We've hit a few rough spots but they seem to be worked out reasonably easily.

This surely isn't the hill I would be willing to die on. Unless your 5th grade science is really a wondeful learning experience that he would be missing out on. I think the better approach is to assist your son in trying all kinds of way to build a relationship with this teacher. You can always hot house on the weekends or have him do powerpoints for the family if you feel like he is missing out on valuable work. You can buy used Middle School Science textbooks on Amazon and use them for nightly reading. You can teach him more science in a weekend than most 5th grade classes learn in 3 months - but having the experience of warming up a 'cold frosty' teacher is a very valuable education for you and for him.

I'm curious how the meeting went, and I'm not against ccing the principle on all your emails with the teacher and being wildly passive agressive.

I'm thinking along the lines of:
"I was so pleased to hear that you have specially selected these excellent worksheets for the 8 kids who won't be allowed to participate in the regular classroom experience because they are being punished. I am glad that you are insisting that my son be more organized."

Then you've complimented the teacher on her caring and attention to detail while making it very clear to the principal exactly what is going on in the classroom. And it alerts the teacher that the principal now knows exactly what is going on. Make sense? Passive agressive isn't good for families, but it has wonderful uses in public areas where one has to 'play nice' and directness isn't appreciated.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Respectfully, I don't think it's a good idea to thank the teacher for going against the IEP, if the OP intends to assert her son's disability-based rights. That would communicate, maybe, that her opinion is that the teacher's actions don't violate the IEP and her son's rights.

If this teacher hasn't for some reason realized that the OP's son has an IEP, or is intentionally violating the OP's son's rights, I wouldn't necessarily trust the principal or anyone else to recognize that fact and follow up by doing the right thing. And I think the relationship with the teacher is likely to be soured further in the short term, no matter what. So while there's a polite way of putting things, I'd do it clearly and a bit forcefully, to communicate the idea with no chance of misunderstanding, as well as the contextual message that the OP is not going to lie down on this.

If there weren't an IEP and disability mixed into this, I think it'd be almost a no-brainer to take the passive-aggressive approach to clue the administrators in on how the teacher is treating the entire class. Maybe a passive-aggressive zinger or two could be put in the message, a la:

We view organization as very important in our family. If my son weren't disabled, and didn't have his IEP which you must have overlooked, I could appreciate some theoretical training effect of punishing your disorganized students by denying them the chance to participate in the normal classroom experience. I'm sure it may be effective in forcing some students to either toe the mark, or else lose out on a lot of the fun of their educational experiences. There are just some students, like my son, who need accommodation because they're disabled in a manner that means that they just can't be trained that way without suffering harm. We need your help in finding a way for our son to learn and grow, without violating his equal right to education.